Sunday, October 29, 2006
A DIALOGUE CONCERNING PROGRESS
Recently, I’ve been engaged in a dialogue with my friend Paco, who is in many ways my most long-time friend (I’ve known him since 1960 – 46 years). The discussion is taking place in an email list of friends from high school and college; people who have followed the wild swings in my mental development for a long, long time. The question is the nature of “progress”. I reproduce the dialogue so far, with some very slight editing to make the discussion suitable for a more public forum, and to fix a few grammatical glitches I noticed upon re-reading the text:- - - - - - - - - -
Paco: Greg, I've been wondering something. Do you still believe in progress? If so, what is it?
GB: Do I still believe in progress? You ask what “progress” is – a good question to which I have my own answer. But I also ask what “believe” means in the context of your question. Does it mean I think progress is possible? Inevitable? Whatever it is, am I in favor of it, even if it’s not possible, or at best improbable?
I’ve stopped thinking that progress past a certain point is inevitable. Advanced civilization on a single planet is just too fragile for that. But I’m still in favor of it, even if I often despair that much more will be possible on this rock.
What is progress? I suppose if I were a bacterium, I might define it as converting as much matter into bacteria as possible. Being an ape, I have ape-like values: Figuring stuff out, playing, sex, loving. Those are good, and more of them is progress. Things that tend to decrease those things are the enemies of progress, so things that tend toward ignorance, stupidity, dourness, frigidity and hate are bad.
Paco: Greg, I'd like to ask you to do better than that. I wasn't baiting you--it's a fair question. You have used the word "progress" many times in the past. It seems to have been an important concept for you. Is it still?
BTW, the genesis of the question came while listening to CDs discussing the transitions from baroque to classical musical forms. As you know, I love baroque music, and I asked myself, "does classical music represent progress?" Or is it just change? It's not a simple question, actually.
There are some areas where progress is indisputable, as in information technology or pharmacology or any number of sciences. I asked my girlfriend last weekend if she believed in progress in mathematics and she, who is philosophically sophisticated, unhesitatingly said yes, and proceeded to enlighten me on four-dimensional mappings that in two dimensions contain holes, or singularities (as when the denominator is zero), but mapped in four dimensions contain parabolas on either side of the singularity extending to infinity. Don't ask me to explain more, but she was struck by the beauty and power of mathematics, and with the awesome track record of discovering mathematical relationships that turn out to describe some aspect of the world we might not have even been aware of when the mathematics was first done.
But the above issues are, I am sure, uncontroversial. What I'm interested in is to know if you believe in social progress, moral progress, or aesthetic progress: something other than mere change, some teleological or historical imperative to human action. And if you do, what's the nature, extent, and structure of progress? It's a big question, and I'm not just sitting around waiting for a reply so I can snap the Truth on you or argue about it--I just invite a dialectical look at what has been or still is an important legacy from the Enlightenment. I think "progress" is not a simple idea at all, though it seems to pose as such.
Anyway, if you would consider a more extended and thoughtful answer, I'm wondering what you think.
GB: Actually, the answer I gave was mainly serious and, at one level of generality, was a real statement of my view of progress. It points to the notion that at least one important aspect of a meaningful idea of progress is premised on the concept of optimizing the social context of “our better natures,” which requires knowing something real about what the hell our natures ARE.
You posit what I believe to be the centrally important challenge of our time: “what has been or still is an important legacy from the Enlightenment.“ As I’m sure I’ve articulated in this forum from time to time, one of the main themes of my thinking for the last twenty years has been that somehow the West took a wrong turn at some point late in what is called “the Enlightenment;” and that that wrong turn is the root cause of much of the horror of the 20th century and the cultural malaise we now experience. Clarifying and revitalizing the fundamental importance of the concept of “progress” is one of the main tasks for anyone who would undertake the seemingly Sisyphusian task of trying to salvage something from the wreckage of the Enlightenment.
So, you say:What I'm interested in is to know if you believe in social progress, moral
progress, or aesthetic progress: something other than mere change, some
teleological or historical imperative to human action.There are two different problems here. One is that “progress” probably means something very different in each of the regimes to which you refer. The other is the reference to teleology and “historical imperative.” Both points are very important. The first has to do with a problem I’ve come to refer to in my internal dialogue as “bundling,” the tendency of things that are not necessarily connected to become connected as accidents of history or intentional acts of cultural behavior. The example of this that I cited recently in an on-going discussion I have with one of my most thoughtful religious friends is the “bundling” of ethics, morality, etiquette, cosmology, myth, aesthetics and many other things in what we commonly think of as “religion.” I pointed out to my friend that one of the things that makes dialogue very difficult between even the best-intentioned of people on either side of the “faith gap” is that folks on my side tend to have “unbundled” these things so early in their mental and emotional lives that they forget how tightly coupled they are for people on the other side.
The same thing has happened with perception and use of the concept of “progress.” Any useful revival of the value of progress will require a rigorous “unbundling” as a first step to see just what progress might mean in the various different regimes to which it might apply and, only after that has been done, to see if some useful “rebundling” might be undertaken.
The second point, about whether there is some teleology or imperative to history that relates to the concept of “progress” has to first pass back through the filter of Marx and Hegel before is can be usefully addressed. This is tough work, that Fukuyama kinda, sorta pointed to in “The End of History,” but which he did not even come close to really DOING.
Discussion of both of these things will have to await a time when I have more time to write but suffice it to say that I have thought a LOT about both of these things over the last few years and will be glad to share those thoughts over time.
Paco: Thanks for your reply. I can certainly understand not having time to respond.
Where do you find this "wrong turn" from the Enlightenment? This seems to be a historical question, but history of what? Politics? Philosophy? The rise of Romanticism? The rise of Whiggery, authoritarian rationalism, nationalism?
GB: Part of the problem of what I’ve been doing the last few years with regard to the subject of this exchange is that I NEVER have the time to just STOP and try to clear my mental decks to systematically see how all the individual ideas I’ve been developing fit together. So I don’t know WHEN I’ll have the time to do this subject – which I consider to be at the core of my intellectual life – justice. So, for now, my contribution will be fragmentary, or not at all.
At any rate, you write:Where do you find this "wrong turn" from the Enlightenment? This seems to be a historical question, but history of what? Politics? Philosophy? The rise of Romanticism? The rise of Whiggery, authoritarian rationalism, nationalism?
I mean all these things. Which means I must mean something more fundamental than “politics,” more coherent than “history” and more pervasive than “philosophy.” What I mean is “culture.” Although philosophy is, in an important sense, the most fundamental aspect of culture, in another sense, things like mythology and aesthetics and etiquette and fashion and science and technology are just as fundamental if you consider culture as the organic totality of the those parts of life that are unique to being human (as opposed to things like climate or ecological dynamics that impact those parts of our lives we share with other animals). The wrong turn is one I perceive in our culture as a whole, from the most fundamental and abstract philosophical speculations to the most ephemeral aspect of fad and fashion.
And yes, the rise of Romanticism and authoritarian rationalism, which I see as deeply and intimately connected, are the great sweeping curves of that wrong turn. If I have to embody in specific persons two waypoints on the path that leads to the dilemma we now face, they are Spinoza and Rousseau. Somewhere between the two, a whole series of vectors in our culture became very powerful that steered us into a world where both Hitler and Stalin were not only possible but inevitable, a world we live in now where both Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan have large, powerful followings that share almost no common cultural vocabulary and values.
And now the great leap to the end. If I have to express What Went Wrong in a few sentences (ones that would require several lifetimes of scholarship to fully explain), it’s this: By no later than the time of Spinoza, a general but very potent plan was laid out for the reconstruction of human culture in the light of reason. But that program required far, far more information – factual information – than was available at the time to undertake on a broad and deep basis. Unfortunately, the promise of the program of rationally rebuilding human culture was so exciting and obvious that people rushed to complete it prematurely across a broad front. The humility that lies at the center of the scientific method was forgotten, and the great gaps were filled in with unsubstantiated speculation and wishful thinking masquerading as science. Those sketchy but emotionally satisfying leaps of imagination contained the seeds of horror. At each step of the process, ghosts from our animal past and the premodern history of our civilization were inserted into the program of rational, scientific cultural reconstruction and injected seeds of destruction.
… and with that great crescendo of hand waiving, I have to go to the office and earn some money.- - - - - - - - - -That's the point we've reached so far. If the discussion continues in a way worth sharing, I'll post it here.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 11:27 AM
LINKS
